farnsworth:

This is not a question of accomodating opposite thoughts. This is all about people who have no regard whatsoever for the truth saying whatever they think will be the most expedient at the given moment.

This is not quite right. They have a deep regard for the truth as they understand it. That truth is that they are good, the elect, the chosen, and we (anyone who opposes them) are evil, spawn of the Devil. This being so, anything goes in a war of Good vs. Evil. Any sin committed for the sake of God is Holy. Any virtuous act for the sake of Satan is an abomination.

That is their "truth." It is a purely Medieval, pre-modern one, rooted in an even more ancient tribalism. And it accords with more primative structures of thinking that have been studied by developmental psychologists in the tradition descended from Piaget.

It is fruitless to try and discern what the actual thoughts of these people are based on what they say. Because what they say exists only in the moment. It exists only for the current news cycle.

This is half-true. Their thinking is necessarily highly bound by context. That's one of the defining aspects of the limitations involved. So naturally it exists only for the current news cycle, the current Supreme Court case (Bush v. Gore), or at best the current Administration (impeachment bad now!) But their thoughts can be discerned from what they say. It just takes a more sophisticated analytical framework to understand how the different, seemingly contradictory parts fit together.

Obviously, they don't fit together in the same logical space that we inhabit, but they do fit together in their logical space, however Kafkaesque/Escher-like that space may be.

I am sorry I cannot lay this out more fully and rigorously here, but a good framework for thinking about such things can be found in Robert Kegan's book, In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life:

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/KEGOVE.html

If you pick it up, pay particular attention to his discussion of mis-communication and misunderstanding between people at different levels, particular between adults and their teenage children.

Movement conservatives are very much stuck in a teenage mindset, denouncing grownups (liberals) as phonies, making passionate appeals to high principle, and then doing something completely opposite and contradictory the next minute, without seeing any contradiction, when another high principle takes hold of them.

And liberals make the mistake that Kegan describes, of thinking that teenagers have the same mental makeup, and can make the same sorts of moral commitments (such as to the rule of law, or even just keeping their word), when clearly they cannot.

It's actually somewhat more complicated than that, since liberalism is the natural expression of a second, more advanced stage of adult cognition, and "principled conservatives" actually do function as adults capable of commitment to the rule of law (see Bruce Fein, for example, whom Glenn has cited numerous times, and who was on Bill Moyers with John Nichols, arguing for impeachment several weeks ago). But it's a very workable first approximation, in the physicists'/engineers' lingo.

Over and over these same people you cite make contradictory statements concerning matters that range from Iraq to health care to banking to homosexuality. The only consistency observable in their statements is the intended short-term benefit to the Republican party.

I am aware that it is usually best to attribute such actions to stupidity rather than malice, but in this case the weight of the evidence makes any other conclusion extremely unlikely. These people are willfully telling whatever lie seems to help them out the most at that moment. They are not holding contradictory opinions. They are not expressing opinions. They are selling their own integrity in an attempt to "win."

This is most certainly true of some, who are completely amoral. Such cases warrant an analysis in terms of psychopathy (google "The Mask of Sanity" to find the PDF of the path-breaking work describing its core nature and distinguishing it from "mental illness").

But true psychopaths are rare--1 percent of the population is the commonly accepted figure. So clearly we are dealing with other factors as well. The developmental psychology approach I propose has the benefit of providing insight into the existence of definite consistencies beneath the outer layer of seemingly complete arbitrariness. Understanding the enemy is key to defeating them. Sun Tzu and all that yadda, yadda, yadda.